Passing Time in Palmdale

One of me taken by the fantastic George Simian

I know it’s been awhile since I last blogged, and I know that I promised to blog every week. What can I say? I’m so bad at keeping on top of this. It’s like that diary I said I was going to keep in 4th grade. It has two entries in it and the second is one sentence long and it simply says, “writing in this is boooooooooooooring.” Blogging isn’t boring. I really do have a lot of stuff that I want to share, but it’s all about getting myself to sit down and do it. So, here I am. I have turned off Masterchef and I am ready to write, however briefly.

This week’s post comes from a fashion/editorial shoot that I had the pleasure of doing a few weeks ago. We trekked out to the desert near Palmdale, California and to the El Mirage dry lake-bed to shoot our lovely model, Melanie. We wanted both the golden hour light, as well as the sunset moving into darkness on the lake-bed. In terms of equipment, it was all pretty basic. I was shooting on my Nikon D810 with a 24-70 2.8 lens and we lit Melanie with a single Einstein unit with an octobox to diffuse the light (provided by my friend, and very talented photographer, George). I like to play with my settings a lot and try out different things. Sometimes what I want to work, doesn’t and what I don’t think will, does. So, I was shooting anywhere from f2.8 – f16, keeping my ISO at 64 the whole time and playing with a shutter speed ranging from 1/250 down to one second at times. Below are some of the images that we captured at both locations, which I processed in Lightroom and Photoshop. I am happy to share my settings on specific images, just ask!

This shoot continues my project that places well dressed people in abandoned places. It's something that continues to fascinate me. We were going for an out of time 80s chic mixed with the abandonment of the desert. Melanie is trapped in time and place. Hopefully, you think we achieved that disjointed look. A huge thank you also goes out to Beata Bernina and Alex Cerderquist, because going to the desert is no fun without a crew of friends!

And, in this final one, I decided to put the lake back in, just for fun: